U.S. Pat. No. 5,457,867 to Maberry et al. discloses a slide assembly and is incorporated herein by reference, which uses rollers 24, 40 as sliding media and comprises a cabinet member 14 and a drawer member 38 slidably connected to the cabinet member 14. When assembling, the cabinet member 14 is fixed to a cabinet panel 12 by a pair of bushings 16, 18 and a pair of screws 20A, 20B, and the drawer member 38 is fixed to a side of a drawer 36 such that the drawer 36 is slidably connected to the cabinet member 14 by the drawer member 38 and easily slides relative to the cabinet panel 12.
The slide assembly using the rollers 24, 40 mentioned above allows a larger assembly tolerance between the drawer 36 and the cabinet panel 12, so that, for the furniture manufacturers, the precision for the drawer 36 and the cabinet panel 12 can be compromised and needs not to be compared with industrial precision. Therefore, the slide assemblies using rollers 24, 40 are widely used on furniture combinations. Nevertheless, the slide assemblies using the rollers 20, 24 have restriction of the loads. Furthermore, as to compensate the assembly tolerance, the slide assemblies are not easily to be combined with soft-closing or push-open design to increase their values.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,895,101 to Cabrales et al. discloses a slide assembly and is incorporated herein by reference, which uses ball bearings as sliding media. The ball bearings have higher standard of precision and can bear relative high load, so that they are welcomed by customers. Furthermore, the ball bearings can be combined with soft-closing design, such as the disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 6,712,435 B2 to Kim et al. However, the high precision of the ball bearings makes them to be squeezed by the drawer and the cabinet when the assembly tolerance between the drawer and the cabinet is beyond the permissible range of the slide assembly. This will result awkward operation of the drawers.
U.S. Publication No. 2013/0106271 A1 to Anderson et al. discloses a rail assembly having at least one fixed member 56 and at least one floating member 54 and is incorporated herein by reference. The at least one fixed member 56 is transversely fixed to a drawer slide, and the at least one floating member 54 is transversely and slidably connected to the fixed member 56. This arrangement permits a relatively large assembly tolerance between the drawer and the cabinet.
However, once the floating member 54 has a quality flaw such as the floating member is broken or the assembly tolerance between the drawer and the cabinet is too large, the floating member 54 might drop from the fixed member 56, and thus, the position to which the whole set of the rail assembly is installed does not permit to have the relative large tolerance between the drawer and the cabinet.
The present invention intends to provide a slide assembly that has a support member which is able to move a limited distance so as to compensate the displacement because of installation tolerance.